A major oil and gas company develops an application to streamline reconciliation processes in their retail stores.
SITUATION
Our client wanted to introduce a mobile app for internal employees that would expedite end-of-day (EOD) reconciliation processes and act as an additional financial control in their retail business. Reconciliations for many items happen at their stores, including carwash, air machines, lottery, and toll payments on motorways and side roads, among others. Most of these reconciliations required a combination of back-office systems and manual processing on Microsoft Excel by the onsite manager at each client site. The app would allow for the elimination of the need for managers to be onsite for reconciliations and would create visibility across the company. The initial scope of the project was to cover 324 sites in the UK, but architectural and solution design were defined with a plan to extend use to other parts of Europe.
Pilot program implemented in 324 client sites reduced reconciliation time from minutes to second
Apex put together a team skilled in Agile methodologies to develop a reconciliation app for both tablet and mobile devices, which automated four main reconciliation processes: Online Lottery Sales Reconciliation, Lottery Prizes Reconciliation, Car Wash Reconciliation, and Car Wash Test Data. This enabled the elimination of the manual Excel spreadsheet used for those processes. The client had low maturity in product ownership, so Apex provided tailored guidance to help them maintain the app we produced. The solution was designed to easily add new items to the system, enabling international use of the app. Additionally, the solution was not developed with hard coding which means a minimal development effort is required for each product update or new country.
RESULT
Through the app, the time to complete the reconciliation process has been reduced significantly, from several minutes to a few seconds by removing the tediousness and potential data inconsistency of the manual entry and reducing it to a simple and more reliable scan of a slip. The main benefits of the Reconciliation App include:
- Support a standard workflow for reconciliations
- Reduce reconciliation time, allowing the site teams to spend more time with customers
- Reduce fraud and error risks
- Simplify onboarding of new site team members
- Provide a central view, and visibility to business owners to support sites that are at risk and provide guidance
